The Washington County, Virginia Sheriff's Office just wrapped up their aggressive criminal traffic enforcement project.

During the week of June 8, the department made 403 traffic stops; 313 resulted in speed violations, and 10 drug charges were made.

It's part of the Washington County, Virginia Sheriff's Office's aggressive criminal and traffic enforcement project, designed to help keep you safe. "To minimize the amount of reckless driving violations speeding violations and try to do drug interdiction to reduce the amount of narcotics coming into our county," says Lt. Greg Hogston.

During one week, deputies searched 25 vehicles and handed out ten drug charges.

Hogston says the department also has certain times when they focus primary and secondary roads. "We look for seat belt violations and alcohol-related violations. When that enforcement wave is over due to the summer travel season, which usually begins around Memorial Day Weekend, we try to focus some on the interstate enforcement," he said.

Hogston says there will be another crackdown in September. "We collect the data and it helps us to better identify what times we need to step our enforcement up to help reduce the number of accidents and fatalities within our county," he said.

Hogston says this time they handed out 29 reckless driving tickets, 5 suspended violations, and 33 other traffic violations.

He says getting numbers like these are important to the department. "We like our enforcement to kind of be data driven process to where we can retrieve the data and later we can identify our problem areas where we need to step up our enforcement."

We checked and Hogston says the money collected from the tickets the county writes on the interstate stays in the county..